Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, Mr. Bethlenfalvy, I would like to apologize for how we massacred your name on the name card prepared for you, but I take some solace in seeing how DBRS also massacred your name, at least in the signature of the French version. That must happen to you a lot.
I would like to come back to what my colleague, Mr. McCallum, was saying, because I think it is very important. As you can see, we do not always have enough time to really delve deeply into these matters. I would like to come back to something you said in English. You justified the triple A rating you granted to asset-backed commercial paper, citing credit quality. Also, referring to the absence of any conflict of interest, you said you were in no more of a position of conflict than the lawyers who prepared the contracts in question.
For six years, I was president of the Office des professions du Québec, a regulatory structure responsible for overseeing all professional occupations and ensuring that these professionals do their job to protect the public. I can assure you that I am very familiar with the subject and I have never heard this theory whereby the group that performs an assessment, and is paid to do so, is in no more of a position of conflict of interest than the lawyer who prepared the contracts.
Can you explain to me how, with this notion of credit quality—to use your terminology—you could have granted a triple A rating to that paper? I am a lawyer, and spent most of my career practising corporate and commercial law. I think it was very clever, from a marketing perspective, to call these “asset backed” transactions. That evoked the notion of some sort of guarantee, while it was nothing of the sort. No one was in a position to follow the owner of that truck all over the place.
Please use clear terminology so that everyone will understand. Even though I have been working in this field for a very long time, I must admit, I am having a hard time understanding your justification of triple A credit quality for something that caused one of the worst economic disasters this country has ever seen.